There is no need of ROOT or SU to run commands as privileged user in ESXi 5.0 or later. You can use AD Authentication and "ESX Admins" group to provide privileged access to users wants to run any command via SSH.

there is no longer a dependency on a shared root account. ESXi 5.1 now allows assigning full administration rights to named users. With this, users can now logon to the ESXi shell using individual accounts without the need to “su” to root, and because there is no longer a dependency on a shared root account all actions performed on the host are logged under the named user rather than the shared “root” account.

I have situation where the vsphere client is showing a running guest but when you attempt to use the power menu item from the user interface (via the API) there are nothing but greyed-out entries. Power-On, Power-Off, Suspend, Reset, Shutdown-Guest, Restart Guest... All of them, greyed-out. I have no idea how this guest got into this hard-locked state, but the APIs don't seem to give me any way of killing this box short of cycling the whole host which is not an option. Online searching found this post http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1004340 which suggests SSH into host and kill the running guest... However, without sudo and without the root password, this is impossible for me even though I have been added to the root group via the APIs...

If there is another way to accomplish this task, I'd love to know. If not, then here's another strong vote for "Add sudo to ESXi"..

Thanks

BTW - This is a 2015 reply to a much older thread... anything recent on this topic?